Eric Schmidt was Alphabet’s ambassador to Washington, Brussels, and Beijing.

In Eric Schmidt’s decade running Google, the company went from internet upstart to a tech giant. And as it did, Mr. Schmidt’s profile had grown and broadened. He gave speeches about the economy and cultivated government relationships.

But Google’s size and search dominance also raised concerns among lawmakers and regulators in both the United States and abroad.

Perhaps Google’s biggest victory during this time was its defeat of the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust probe. Officials for the agency had recommended in 2012 that the commission sue to challenge some of Google’s business practices, in what would have been the biggest antitrust case since the government sued Microsoft.

Mr. Schmidt was also a supporter of Hillary Clinton’s most recent presidential run and was “ready to fund, advise recruit talent, etc,” according to the hacked emails of Clinton campaign officials that were released by Wikileaks.

But Mr. Schmidt’s influence in Washington has waned since President Trump was elected.

Eric Schmidt is stepping down as executive chairman of Alphabet.

Mr. Schmidt joined Google in 2001 as chief executive to provide what amounted to adult supervision for the company’s young founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. He helped take the company public in 2004. A decade after taking the helm at Google he handed the reins of the company to Mr. Page and became executive chairman.

Mr. Schmidt will relinquish the executive chairman role at Alphabet’s next board meeting. He will continue to serve on the company’s board and will become a technical adviser to Alphabet. No reason was provided for the change. In a statement, Mr. Schmidt said that he, Mr. Page, Mr. Brin and Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, “believe that the time is right in Alphabet’s evolution for this transition.”

Goldman continues to embrace Bitcoin.

Goldman Sachs is positioning itself to become the first Wall Street firm to set up a cryptocurrency trading desk, Bloomberg reports. The firm aims to have the desk up and running by the end of June.

The Bloomberg article comes nearly three months after The Wall Street Journal reported that Goldman was “weighing a new trading operation dedicated to bitcoin and other digital currencies.”

Goldman has been more willing than its rivals to embrace digital currencies. It is one of the few Wall Street banks to clear bitcoin futures offered by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and Chicago Board Options Exchange.

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A Boeing 737 MAX at a plant in Renton, Washington.CreditMatt Mcknight/Reuters

Boeing is circling Brazil’s Embraer.

Boeing has held takeover talks with Brazilian aircraft maker Embraer, a deal that would give Boeing a presence in the regional jet market, the WSJ reports. Shares of Embraer jumped more than 31 percent on the news. Boeing’s shares are down slightly on the day.

• Embraer has a market value of $3.7 billion as of Thursday morning. According to the WSJ, the two companies “have been discussing a deal that would involve a relatively large premium.”

• It’s far from certain the Brazilian government would sign off on a deal given that Embraer is “a crown-jewel of Brazilian industry.”

• A deal with Embraer would help Boeing counter Airbus’s plans to “take a majority stake in a joint venture with Bombardier that builds the single-aisle CSeries.”

• In a series of initial rulings over the last few months, the Commerce Department decided to levy duties of nearly 300 percent on the Bombardier CSeries, an early victory for Boeing that would increase the price of the rival plane in the United States.

Apple is big, but just how big?

A 55 percent surge in the tech giant’s stock has pushed Apple’s market value above $900 billion this fall. That’s a level no other American-listed company has hit. In fact, none have crossed $800 billion. Google-parent Alphabet has gotten the closet with a market capitalization of nearly $750 billion.

• By another measure, Apple’s size is even less impressive. Apple’s share of the total stock market doesn’t even rank in the top 20 going back to 1925. Consider that in May 1932, AT&T constituted 13 percent of the entire stock market — more than five times higher than Apple’s proportion today. In fact, Apple shares represented a larger share of the total stock market in September 2012 than they do now, 3.2 percent compared with 2.5 percent today.

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An iPhone X advertisement in Beijing.CreditAndy Wong/Associated Press

Is the iPhone X reversing Apple’s market share slide in China?

Morgan Stanley made the tech giant its top stock pick for 2018. The reason? What it sees as Apple’s growing share of China’s smartphone market.

That goes against the recent trend, in which cheaper smartphone rivals have taken market share away from Apple in China.

Here’s a breakdown of Morgan Stanley’s key points (note that Morgan Stanley’s data is through Nov. 19, when iPhone X had been on sale for just 16 days.):

• “iPhone X adoption in China is on a faster pace than the iPhone 8 or 8 Plus.”

• Apple has a 57 percent retention rate among iPhone users when they upgrade. That’s 20 percentage points higher than any other brand in China.

• Apple’s net switching rate, “or percentage of non-iPhone smartphone owners that switched to an iPhone minus the percentage of iPhone owners that switched away to a different smartphone brand,” increased in China to 9.2 percent during the four-weeks prior to Nov. 19.Only one other brand in China had a positive net switching rate over that period.

In conclusion: “Ultimately, these data points show that faster iPhone X penetration, coupled with increasing switching rates to Apple, have accelerated market share gains for the iPhone in China.”

• “Enforcement proceedings conducted by FINMA between May 2016 and June 2017 uncovered serious shortcomings in the anti-money laundering controls of J.P. Morgan (Switzerland) Ltd in connection with business relationships and transactions associated with the allegedly corrupt Malaysian sovereign wealth fund 1MDB.”

• “The bank failed in particular to identify the money-laundering risks relating to cash flows between business accounts and personal accounts.”

• “In one case, it credited hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars from the 1MDB sovereign wealth fund, allegedly earmarked for the purchase of a company, to the personal account of an individual with close ties to a 1MDB business partner.”

JPMorgan’s statement:

• “The resolution announced by FINMA relates to matters that took place many years ago in the Swiss private bank, and since that time we have increased training, added staff and made improvements in monitoring and surveillance.”

FINMA, which did not impose monetary penalties on the bank, has appointed a monitor “to carry out an on-site review of the appropriateness and functioning of the bank’s controls and monitor them on an ongoing basis.”

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This is a Long Island iced tea, and not a way to exploit blockchain technology or other elements of digital currencies.CreditThomas Patterson for The New York Times

This is the world we live in now.

Long Island Iced Tea Corp. (NasdaqCM: LTEA) (the “Company”), today announced that the parent company is shifting its primary corporate focus towards the exploration of and investment in opportunities that leverage the benefits of blockchain technology. In connection with the shift in strategic direction, the Company has approved changing its name from “Long Island Iced Tea Corp.” to “Long Blockchain Corp.” and has reserved the web domain www.longblockchain.com.

How the carried interest tax break survived.

Lobbyists for private equity, venture capital and real estate investors held weekly organization conference calls. Then they worked lawmakers.

More from Tory Newmyer of the WaPo:

Long before congressional tax writers began detailing their proposals, the industry groups helped recruit 22 House Republicans to write to House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady (R-Tex.). Their June 13 letter, spearheaded on the Hill by Rep. Richard Hudson (R-N.C.), urged the panel not to “arbitrarily punish investors in real estate, venture capital, private equity and other partnerships.” The tax package, they wrote, needed to bolster “long-term investment in American companies.”

Twenty-two lawmakers in the House — and the support of Representative Kevin Brady of Texas, who was a primary writer of the House legislation, was enough to potentially block that chamber’s bill.

— Michael J. de la Merced

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President Trump celebrated the passage of the tax overhaul on Wednesday with members of Congress outside the White House.CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times

A merry “Taxmas,” but who’ll get the bigger present?

In a surely coincidental series of announcements, several companies — including AT&T, Comcast, Wells Fargo, Fifth Third Bancorp and Boeing — announced that they were giving their employees bonuses or higher wages, and increasing investment in light of the passage of the Republican tax bill.

An aim of the tax bill is to help American companies, in the belief that they will in turn bolster the economy as a whole. (Justin Fox of Bloomberg View writes that AT&T’s bonuses aren’t a gimmick, but a natural consequence of a corporate tax cut.)

But skeptics have asserted that those companies really just want to get on President Trump’s good side. (AT&T, for example, is seeking approval for its Time Warner deal despite a lawsuit by the Justice Department. At a news conference, Mr. Trump praised AT&T’s bonus and capital investment plans.)

Some back-of-the-envelope calculations, courtesy of Binyamin Appelbaum of the NYT:

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A bigger question: How long can any economic stimulus from the tax bill last?

“The really hard question a year from now is going to be is how much of the miniboom we see is just an acceleration of stuff that was going to happen anyway or additional investment that is really going to spur the economy,” said Mihir A. Desai, a professor of finance at Harvard Business School.

The tax flyaround

• Expect more mergers next year, as clarity on tax policy settles in and penalties for selling businesses fall away, Aaron Back writes. (Heard on the Street)

• The tax overhaul doesn’t change the fact that automation will still cause job losses, and that giants like Apple and Alphabet will still pay lower taxes than nascent rivals, Farhad Manjoo writes in his latest State of the Art. (NYT)

• Highly indebted companies like Dell are still worried about the limits on deductions tied to corporate debt. (WSJ)

• Daniel Shaviro of N.Y.U.’s School of Law says of Mr. Trump, “I’m not even aware of a single provision in the bill that disadvantages him or his family, other than the change to state and local tax deductibility.” (WaPo)

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CreditSimon Dawson/Reuters

What will the European court loss mean for Uber’s valuation?

The finding by the European Court of Justice that the ride-hailing giant is a transportation service instead of an online platform throws a hurdle into Uber’s expansion plan. The company won’t be kicked out of any countries, but the ruling does prevent the rollout of any services involving nonprofessional drivers — like UberPop (or UberX in the United States).

The decision comes as a group led by SoftBank is trying to buy out existing investors through a tender offer. Expect some negotiating between the two sides up until the last minute of the offer period, but SoftBank has gotten a bit more negotiating leverage thanks to the E.C.J.

Coming up fast in the rearview mirror: Didi Chuxing, Uber’s frenemy in China, has just raised $4 billion from SoftBank and the Abu Dhabi state fund Mubadala. Uber is technically an investor in Didi now, thanks to a truce the two struck last year — but Didi is reportedly weighing an expansion into North America.

It’s time for some math

• Technically, Uber has retained its $68.5 billion valuation because SoftBank’s group has bought $1 billion of new shares at that level.

• But the SoftBank consortium is trying to buy out shareholders at a $48 billion valuation.

How SoftBank is changing Silicon Valley, continued.

It appears to be a reflection of an increasingly clear fact: When SoftBank has almost $100 billion in its Vision Fund to invest — and can write a $250 million check in one go — more traditional players will be forced to react. One way is to try to go bigger.

As one unidentified V.C. investor told Kara Swisher of Recode:

“It’s made everyone else realize they need more capital, so that SoftBank is not the lead in every deal.”

A different approach: Remember when we reported earlier this week TPG Growth raised only slightly more money for its own new fund? Why not go whole hog? The fund’s managing partner, Bill McGlashan, told Michael: “It’d change the kind of companies we’d invest in.” (Translation: Trying to play in the Vision Fund’s kind of megadeals means taking bigger risks to make the kind of returns that the fund earns now.)

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CreditTony Dejak/Associated Press

Rolling Stone is the latest trophy for Penske Media.

Penske — which already owns Variety, Deadline and WWD — has paid about $51 million for a majority stake in the onetime music industry touchstone. Rolling Stone was valued at about $100 million.

Jann S. Wenner, the co-founder of Rolling Stone, will stay on at Wenner Media as its editorial director. His son, Gus Wenner, will remain president and chief operating officer and will also join the advisory board of Penske Media, whose properties include Variety, Deadline and WWD. The companies said Wenner Media would retain “majority control and editorial oversight” of Rolling Stone.

Whom Penske reportedly beat out: James Dolan of Madison Square Garden and the investment firm Rizvi Traverse, according to Variety.

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Bill O’Reilly has said that he “never mistreated anyone.”CreditBrent N. Clarke/FilmMagic

The latest in sexual misconduct news.

• Two women who had settled sexual harassment claims with the former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly have joined a defamation lawsuit against him and the network, asserting that they had been wrongfully depicted as liars and extortionists. (NYT)

• The NYT said that it would remove the reporter Glenn Thrush from the White House beat, but would not fire him, after investigating accusations that he had sexually harassed women at previous jobs. (NYT)

• The artist Chuck Close apologized for making insensitive remarks to women after he faced accusations of sexually harassing them when they came to his studio. (NYT)

• Damian Green, one of Prime Minister Theresa May’s top deputies, stepped down from her cabinet after an investigation found that he had made misleading claims about pornography on his work computer. (BBC)

• The presenter Catt Sadler resigned from E! Entertainment because, she said, she was being paid half of what her co-host of “E! News” was making. (Chicago Tribune)

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CreditDan Kitwood/Getty Images

Even big investors want in on Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is arguably in a bear market — because it has fallen 20 percent off its high point, which was set on Monday. But that hasn’t deterred some of Wall Street’s most sophisticated investors from wanting to dive into the world of digital currencies. (Why? Bitcoin is still up some 1,600 percent for the year.)

Some sizable firms and big-name investors already are involved in bitcoin. Fortress Investment Group owns over $100 million of bitcoin. Horizon Kinetics LLC, a firm that manages more than $6 billion in hedge funds, mutual funds and other products and calls itself “value-oriented and “risk-averse,” has been vocal about its recent purchases of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

The ongoing tale of Bitcoin Cash: Coinbase is investigating claims of insider trading in the Bitcoin offshoot. After the exchange reopened trading in Bitcoin Cash, the digital currency fell, and as of this morning was trading at about $3,632.

The digital currency flyaround

• North Korea is suspected of carrying out a heist at a South Korean Bitcoin exchange, Youbit, that led to the company filing for bankruptcy protection. (WSJ)

• An unidentified trader has made a nearly $1 million bet that Bitcoin will reach $50,000 next year, using options. (WSJ)

• The founder of Litecoin, another digital currency, has sold his holdings. (Reddit)

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Rachelle Ann Go and Jamael Westman, who play Eliza and Alexander Hamilton in the London production of “Hamilton.”CreditMatthew Murphy

It’s not Bitcoin, but …

Backers of the Broadway production of “Hamilton,” including the billionaire Len Blavatnik, have made a return of about 600 percent on their investment, according to the FT. Investors in the London production, which officially opens today, expect to collect a similar kind of return.

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CreditAriel Schalit/Associated Press

Quote of the Day

“The first pill you take is the ‘anti-friendship’ pill. You can be my friend for 30 years, but I’m gonna stab your eyeball out with an ice pick if it gets me more power.”

— Anthony Scaramucci, speaking at a Hanukkah party hosted by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach this week about what it was like to work in the White House, according to Page Six. (It was hard choosing just one quote.)

The Speed Read

• Royal Dutch Shell and Eni will go on trial in March on charges of corruption in a $1.3 billion oil deal in Nigeria. (NYT)

• The zero bonus, or doughnut, could be looming for bond traders as bank revenue from fixed-income sales and trading units has been falling. (FT)

• Millions of Americans have been caught up in the debate on repeal of net neutrality rules, but the most vocal and committed activity may have come from digitally savvy teenagers who grew up with an open internet. (NYT)

• Litigation for past misconduct that contributed to the financial crisis could cost European banks more than $100 billion, with several lenders still facing cases that could require billions of dollars to settle. (Bloomberg)

• The special-purpose acquisition vehicle Nomad Foods is in talks to buy Britain’s Goodfella’s Pizza for about 200 million pounds, or about $267 million. (FT)

• A New Zealand regulator blocked the HNA’s planned acquisition of UDC, a finance company, saying that it couldn’t determine which foreign person owned and controlled HNA’s local subsidiary. (WSJ)

• Guggenheim Partners has joined Carl Icahn in opposing a deal for the oil company SandRidge Energy to buy Bonanza Creek. (FT)

• CEFC, a Chinese oil conglomerate, and Penta Investments, a Czech-Slovak financial group, have submitted a joint bid for Time Warner’s Central European Media Enterprises, which could be worth about $2 billion. (Reuters)

• Spotify is expected to receive approval from the Securities and Exchange Commission for the direct listing of its shares on the New York Stock Exchange. (WSJ)

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